Florida COVID update Sunday: 5,065 new cases, the second day under 100 deaths in 2021

The state of Florida’s COVID-19 dashboard reported 5,065 new cases and 95 total deaths Sunday, the second day under 100 deaths in 2021.

The first such day was last Sunday, Feb. 14, which had 96 deaths, all of which were residents.

Of the 95 deaths, 93 were Florida residents.

For the novel coronavirus pandemic, Florida has had 1,868,772 total cases, 29,906 resident deaths and 30,434 total deaths.

The state’s positive test rate Saturday was 6.32%, according to the daily COVID-19 report, the 12th consecutive day the positive test rate has been under 7%.

COVID vaccines in Florida and South Florida

▪ Florida: The state’s vaccination report says another 10,853 people have received the first COVID vaccine dose and 7,470 received their second dose, meaning 1,305,034 people are halfway through the vaccine and 1,388,919 are fully vaccinated.

▪ Miami-Dade County: The state reported 1,282 people completed their vaccinations, meaning 156,160 in Miami-Dade have received both vaccination shots.

▪ Broward: Another 704 people completed their vaccinations, putting Broward’s completed vaccine total at 133,974.

▪ Palm Beach: After 382 people completed their vaccine treatment, 128,209 in Palm Beach County have received both shots.

▪ Monroe: Ten people completed their vaccine shot treatment. Overall, 5,557 have done so.

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Confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Florida

▪ Miami-Dade County reported 1,128 more people who tested positive and 10 more COVID-19 deaths, putting its pandemic totals at 402,265 cases and 5,290 deaths.

The positive test rate on Saturday was 6.38%, according to the county-by-county breakdown, the 13th consecutive day under 7%.

▪ Broward County reported another 708 cases and 16 deaths, moving its totals to 189,833 cases and 2,340 deaths.

The positive test rate was 7.44% on Saturday, the highest since Feb. 7.

▪ Palm Beach County reported 328 new cases (117,559 for the pandemic) and zero deaths (2,394).

Saturday’s positive rate was 5.85%, the third day of the last six in the 5% range.

▪ Monroe County reported 13 new cases and zero deaths. Pandemic totals in the Keys are 5,688 cases and 44 deaths.

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Current hospitalizations

Government officials use current hospitalizations to decide the next action in dealing with the pandemic. On the state level, this has been steadily falling over the last month.

The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration reports the number of patients hospitalized statewide with a “primary diagnosis of COVID.” The data, which is updated at least every hour, does not distinguish between the number of COVID-19 patients in hospital intensive care units and those in acute-care beds, which require less attention from nurses.

As of 12:31 p.m Sunday, the agency said there were 4,156 people hospitalized, a 57-person drop from 3:45 p.m. Monday and a huge plunge of 531 from last Sunday. South Florida’s counties generally saw little change from Saturday: Miami-Dade up eight to 690; Broward, up 12 to 573; Palm Beach, up 13 to 322; and Monroe, down one hospitalization to three.

An earlier version of this story misstated the number of new cases reported.

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    Central Park, New York City, on Memorial Day weekend, May 24, 2020. Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty ImagesThe COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is the deepest and longest period of malaise in a dozen years. Our colleagues at the University of Vermont have concluded this by analyzing posts on Twitter. The Vermont Complex Systems Center studies 50 million tweets a day, scoring the “happiness” of people’s words to monitor the national mood. That mood today is at its lowest point since 2008 when they started this project. They call the tweet analysis the Hedonometer. It relies on surveys of thousands of people who rate words indicating happiness. “Laughter” gets an 8.50 while “jail” gets a 1.76. They use these scores to measure the mood of Twitter traffic. The Hedonometer measures happiness through analysis of key words on Twitter, which is now used by one in five Americans. 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The powerful effects of nature are strongest in large parks with more trees, but smaller neighborhood parks also provide a significant boost. Their impact on happiness is real, measurable and lasting. Twitter records show that parks increase happiness to a level similar to the bounce at Christmas, which typically is the happiest day of the year. Schwartz has since expanded his Twitter study to the 25 largest cities in the U.S. and found this bounce everywhere. Parks and public spaces won’t cure COVID-19 or stop police brutality, but they are far more than playgrounds. There is growing evidence that parks contribute to mental and physical health in a range of communities. In a 2015 study, for example, Stanford researchers sent people out for one of two walks: through a local park or on a busy street. Those who walked in nature showed improved moods and better memory performance compared to the urban group. And a team led by Gina South of the University of Pennsylvania showed in a 2018 study that greening and cleaning up blighted vacant lots in Philadelphia reduced local residents’ feelings of depression, worthlessness and poor mental health. Creative strategies It isn’t easy to create new parks on the scale of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park or the Washington Mall, but smaller projects can expand outdoor space. Options include greening vacant lots, closing streets and investing in existing parks to make them safer, greener and shadier and support wildlife. These initiatives don’t have to be capital-intensive. In the University of Pennsylvania study, for example, renovating a vacant lot by removing trash, planting grass and trees and installing a low fence cost only about US Why using fear to promote COVID-19 vaccination and mask wearing could backfire https://theconversation.com/why-using-fear-to-promote-covid-19-vaccination-and-mask-wearing-could-backfire-153865 Sun, 21 Feb 2021 15:06:36 +0000 tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/153865 History holds some lessons about when scaring people to change their behavior works. Two public health experts offer a case for caution right now. Amy Lauren Fairchild, Dean and Professor, College of Public Health, The Ohio State University and Ronald Bayer, Professor Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University Images of death have been used as a scare tactic in public health campaigns for years. Buda Mendes/Getty ImagesYou probably still remember public service ads that scared you: The cigarette smoker with throat cancer. The victims of a drunk driver. The guy who neglected his cholesterol lying in a morgue with a toe tag. With new, highly transmissible variants of SARS-CoV-2 now spreading, some health professionals have started calling for the use of similar fear-based strategies to persuade people to follow social distancing rules and get vaccinated. There is compelling evidence that fear can change behavior, and there have been ethical arguments that using fear can be justified, particularly when threats are severe. As public health professors with expertise in history and ethics, we have been open in some situations to using fear in ways that help individuals understand the gravity of a crisis without creating stigma. But while the pandemic stakes might justify using hard-hitting strategies, the nation’s social and political context right now might cause it to backfire. Fear as a strategy has waxed and waned Fear can be a powerful motivator, and it can create strong, lasting memories. Public health officials’ willingness to use it to help change behavior in public health campaigns has waxed and waned for more than a century. From the late 19th century into the early 1920s, public health campaigns commonly sought to stir fear. Common tropes included flies menacing babies, immigrants represented as a microbial pestilence at the gates of the country, voluptuous female bodies with barely concealed skeletal faces who threatened to weaken a generation of troops with syphilis. The key theme was using fear to control harm from others. The Works Progress Administration created posters warning of the dangers of syphilis in the 1930s. Library of Congress Following World War II, epidemiological data emerged as the foundation of public health, and use of fear fell out of favor. The primary focus at the time was the rise of chronic “lifestyle” diseases, such as heart disease. Early behavioral research concluded fear backfired. An early, influential study, for example, suggested that when people became anxious about behavior, they might tune out or even engage more in dangerous behaviors, like smoking or drinking, to cope with the anxiety stimulated by fear-based messaging. But by the 1960s, health officials were trying to change behaviors related to smoking, eating and exercise, and they grappled with the limits of data and logic as tools to help the public. They turned again to scare tactics to try to deliver a gut punch. It was not enough to know that some behaviors were deadly. We had to react emotionally. Although there were concerns about using fear to manipulate people, leading ethicists began to argue that it could help people understand what was in their self-interest. A bit of a scare could help cut through the noise created by industries that made fat, sugar and tobacco alluring. It could help make population-level statistics personal. New York City has run tough anti-smoking campaigns. NYC Health Anti-tobacco campaigns were the first to show the devastating toll of smoking. They used graphic images of diseased lungs, of smokers gasping for breath through tracheotomies and eating through tubes, of clogged arteries and failing hearts. Those campaigns worked. And then came AIDS. Fear of the disease was hard to untangle from fear of those who suffered the most: gay men, sex workers, drug users, and the black and brown communities. The challenge was to destigmatize, to promote the human rights of those who only stood to be further marginalized if shunned and shamed. When it came to public health campaigns, human rights advocates argued, fear stigmatized and undermined the effort. A Canadian campaign against drunk driving showed the risks to others. When obesity became a public health crisis, and youth smoking rates and vaping experimentation were sounding alarm bells, public health campaigns once again adopted fear to try to shatter complacency. Obesity campaigns sought to stir parental dread about youth obesity. Evidence of the effectiveness of this fear-based approach mounted. Evidence, ethics and politics So, why not use fear to drive up vaccination rates and the use of masks, lockdowns and distancing now, at this moment of national fatigue? Why not sear into the national imagination images of makeshift morgues or of people dying alone, intubated in overwhelmed hospitals? Before we can answer these questions, we must first ask two others: Would fear be ethically acceptable in the context of COVID-19, and would it work? For people in high-risk groups – those who are older or have underlying conditions that put them at high risk for severe illness or death – the evidence on fear-based appeals suggests that hard-hitting campaigns can work. The strongest case for the efficacy of fear-based appeals comes from smoking: Emotional PSAs put out by organizations like the American Cancer Society beginning in the 1960s proved to be a powerful antidote to tobacco sales ads. Anti-tobacco crusaders found in fear a way to appeal to individuals’ self-interests. This CDC campaign used smokers’ stories as a warning. At this political moment, however, there are other considerations. Health officials have faced armed protesters outside their offices and homes. Many people seem to have lost the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood. By instilling fear that government will go too far and erode civil liberties, some groups developed an effective political tool for overriding rationality in the face of science, even the evidence-based recommendations supporting face masks as protection against the coronavirus. Reliance on fear for public health messaging now could further erode trust in public health officials and scientists at a critical juncture. The nation desperately needs a strategy that can help break through pandemic denialism and through the politically charged environment, with its threatening and at times hysterical rhetoric that has created opposition to sound public health measures. Even if ethically warranted, fear-based tactics may be dismissed as just one more example of political manipulation and could carry as much risk as benefit. Instead, public health officials should boldly urge and, as they have during other crisis periods in the past, emphasize what has been sorely lacking: consistent, credible communication of the science at the national level.This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Amy Lauren Fairchild, The Ohio State University and Ronald Bayer, Columbia University. Read more:Video: Current rates of vaccine hesitancy in the US could mean a long road to normalcyCoronavirus vaccines: health experts identify ways to build public trustAmericans have unrealistic expectations for a COVID-19 vaccine Amy Lauren Fairchild received funding from the Greenwall Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Ronald Bayer received funding from the Greenwall Foundation. .

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